The authors assess the costs and benefits of the possibilities of either assigning D Block spectrum to public safety or auctioning the spectrum for commercial use. They suggest that analysis purports that the 10 MHz spectrum, if used for public safety, would provide somewhere in the neighborhood of $3.4 billion in “social benefits”. Social benefits being any positive outcome for a community in the case of an emergency.

A recent House Energy & Commerce hearing on Network Neutrality and Internet Regulation: Warranted or More Economic Harm Than Good took up the quality of the FCC’s “market analysis,” and the question whether the agency had performed any such analysis at all. The FCC Chairman insisted that the work had been done and that it [...]

“Why Unlimited Mobile-to-Mobile Calling is Evidence of a Lack of Wireless Competition”, suggests that there has been no competition in the wireless marketplace because AT&T is offering a new unlimited mobile-to-mobile plan. Mr. Weinberg claims that this new plan is evidence that there has not been competition in the market for some time.

The same people protesting a 10 watt cell tower don’t seem to be as alarmed by TV towers broadcasting at over a million watt in the exact same VHF and UHF frequencies. By effectively paralyzing new cell tower construction, people are exposed to much higher cell phone transmit levels which are millions of times stronger than the cell tower due to close proximity.

At Investor’s Business Daily, Robert Higgs takes a gloomy look at the current state of net investment in the U.S., and concludes: Unless private investment recovers more rapidly, the economy’s recovery is sure to remain slow, too slow to significantly lower unemployment. Firms are reluctant to undertake risky long-term investments because they continue to view [...]

Wallsten examines the state of the Universal Service Fund. The USF is a program that collects taxes for telecommunications services in the neighborhood of about $7.5 billion a year. The funds are intended to be used to provide telephone lines and subsidize telephone service in rural areas to low-income individuals.

I’ve been hammering popular online services like Facebook and Twitter for months for utterly weak efforts to protect consumers so I was pleased to hear that Senator Chuck Schumer has joined the fight. Some of the worst online services in my online security report card were served letters by Senator Schumer asking them to turn SSL security on by default.

Now, fans of the 2002 sci-fi series Firefly are adapting this collective action approach to bringing back their show. It started when the Science channel announced a showing of the 12-episode series, starting in March, and escalated when leading actor Nathan Fillion opined that he would love to pick up the role of Captain Malcolm Reynolds again and that if he had the money he would buy the rights and put the on the Internet. Others involved in the show chimed in with their support.

I had the opportunity to read a paper by several professors at the University of Madrid, Darmstadt University of Technology, and the University of Oregon a few weeks back on the subject of Peer to Peer (P2P) file sharing often referred to in passing as “torrenting”.

CNN is reporting that Apple is in talks with the music industry to offer improved quality 24-bit audio tracks, but an increase in sampling rate was not mentioned in the article.  The 24-bit format has been around since the late 1990s among professional musicians and it’s been readily available to consumers since the early 2000s, [...]